Do any of you remember Yaoi House, an original boys’ love fiction publisher I’ve reported on twice? Well, things have gotten weirder.
Founder Kira originally found God and dumped both Yaoi House and Yaoi Underground, her own paid subscription fanfiction (yes, fanfiction) service. I knew at the time that Yaoi Underground was most selling Taming Rikki, an extended fanfic of the popular BL novels Ai no Kusabi, but it didn’t seem too important since last I’d heard it was going down.
But now Kira has apparently resurfaced and says that she didn’t find God, she found hallucinations, and that she’s extremely bipolar. Between the fans and the investors, it all turns into a giant sludge-puddle of drama, with Kira voicing suspicion that people knew she wasn’t in her right mind and intentionally started taking away her business. (I mean, why would you want to take the business you’ve invested in away from someone who’s not in their right mind? Yeesh.) Meanwhile, the Internets are lambasting Kira for selling fanfiction in the first place (though a couple of people rightfully compare it to doujinshi, which of course is sold for money in Japan, although on the other hand, this isn’t Japan).
If you’re curious about the debacle– which probably won’t have a major effect on the BL industry, but which is kind of interesting in the same way that watching a train wreck is interesting –you can check out a nice timeline of events with quotes over at Dear Author.